I can’t help it if your claim is unfalsibiable, that’s not my problem. We have leftists attacking Trump supporters, we don’t have Trump supporters attacking leftists, so you are trying to pretend that an unknown quantity of white-on-other racial violence is motivated by Trump in absence of any evidence to that effect. I understand that it’s important to you not to accept that it’s the left that’s being violent here, but you don’t actually have a reason to think so outside of desire.
No, there isn’t, at least not if you don’t sneakily change what you mean by ‘such incidents’. If you check the SPLC data and places like Vox news that trumpet it, they are comparing incidents where somebody says “Built the Wall” and a nearby hispanic is offended as ‘hate crimes’, while simply not recording any incidents of trump supporters being harassed. There was a miniscule increase in anti-Muslim violence in 2015, which still has it way behind anti-semitism.
Except that there’s no such thing. Rates of violence against hispanics have been steadily rising for five years, since before Trump was a factor. Violence against Muslims rose a miniscule 6% last year, and violence against Blacks is irrelevant because Trump hasn’t spoken ill of blacks- and of course, because any increased violence against blacks (if it exists, I don’t know) would be much more easily explained by reaction to BLM.
Which brings me to my other point- if you’re really talking about “A spike in racist violence since the election”, then obviously, OBVIOUSLY the lion’s share of that spike is coming from anti-white crime as BLM-type groups take to the streets burning things down, attacking people for being white, and etc.
Yeah, and I think that disagreement isn’t real, it’s rhetoric. The person who initially says “Trump supporters are violent” doesn’t mean 100% of them (or even most of them, probably). The person who hears the statement and response to it knows full well the statement wasn’t said meaning 100%, also. So if the two of them end up arguing over the significance of some non-violent Trump supporters existing, then they are engaging in a bunch of dishonest political posturing where neither of of them is saying what they mean, or responding to what they know the other person means.
So take it out of politics, if I say “Fat people are lazy”, I say that knowing there are certainly some fat people that aren’t lazy. If you respond by saying “Well, my Dad is fat and hes’ the most active person I’ve ever known”, then you responded knowing that I knew that some fat people aren’t lazy. If I take the bait and argue with you about your Dad and- heaven forbid- why generalizations are harmful, then we’ve just launched a dishonest conversation about nothing that goes nowhere, when the topic should have been whether laziness is a trend among fat people, and maybe what can be done about it, and so on.
Well, when you accept that both of them are generalizations that are made to evoke some political sentiment and gain some rhetorical advantage, and then you see that one of the two statements has evidence to support it and the other doesn’t, and then you further note that the statement of the two that doesn’t actually have any evidence to support it is the one that was promoted by the media this entire time, that’s why the juxtaposition is important.
It’s an outlining of hypocrisy, in other words. Increasingly, liberals attack somebody or burn something down every time something doesn’t go their way. This is bad enough, but doing it while pushing a narrative that the other side are the dangerous, violent ones is worse.
Why do you think there was all this talk about the “hidden Trump vote”? It’s because fewer and fewer people want to deal with the social consequences of disagreeing with a liberal.
That is certainly true.
That ordinarily pans out. I think the problem though is that as long as you’re talking about statistics, most people aren’t violent anyway. So the violent folks are such an extreme outlier that I don’t know gender demographics is really important. What’s more, a ‘supporter’ I don’t think means in this context anybody who is predisposed to vote one way or the other; the typical supporter of either (any) candidate just barely gives a shit or thinks about it at all- they vote for the party they have always voted for or the issue they have always supported, and that’s it. When you’re talking about a pair of groups into which virtually everybody in the country falls, saying one group or the other is violent is just stupid- the country would be a very different place if half of us had violent tendencies.
So when we’re looking at ‘supporters’, it would probably be more helpful only to consider those people who are such big supporters that they are willing to wear a funny hat, and are willing to phonebank/stump/go out on the street and yell about their candidate. I’m quite sure when people say “Trump supporters are violent” they mean the guys in red hats to go to rallies and yell and chant and such, not everybody who pulled a lever for Trump.
But of course, somebody who violently attacks somebody else because of their political prefernce is already one of these ‘super-supporters’ by definition, regardless of what else they’ve done.
The OTHER thing to consider is that, like it or not, Hillary doesn’t really matter. This election wasn’t Hillary vs Trump, it was Trump vs. anti-Trump. That’s how it was covered, that’s how virtually every conversation took place during this cycle, and that’ probably part of why he won. It feels disingenuous to call anybody who attacks somebody for supporting Trump “A Hillary Supporter” when odds are they were only supporting her reluctantly and by default.
Simply put, the question boils down to who is more likely to resort to violence: the guys in the red hats chanting “Build the Wall” or the guys with the three-colored-hair chanting “Fuck Donald Trump”. We have little evidence that the “MAGA” squads are actually violent people. We have exceedingly little evidence of this compared to how often they were accused of being violent by the press.
Even more simply put, Trump supporters were taking a calculated risk of violence every time they showed support for Trump in public, even as the press was berating them for being the violent ones.
Yeah, but if you get enough of them, they start to mean something. I’ll submit right now that virtually every Trump supporter in the country had at least a few moments during the campaign where they felt the need to hide/deny their support for fear of violence, harassment, unemployment, etc. In many ways, that’s just life if you’re a conservative in the U.S., because the left really is that violent and dangerous, but it was worse this time. So what you’re seeing is James’ anecdote, but what you’re not seeing is every single Trump supporter in an urban part of the country reading that anecdote and thinking “Yep.”
Every single Republican who lives in a town of more than 10,000 people or so knows the risk they are taking by putting up a simple bumpersticker for what they believe. Every single one of us has a list of how many friends we would lose if we expressed how we felt about Trump, immigration, etc. on social media- assuming we haven’t already taken that plunge.
Are they increasing? This one is certainly bad and high profile, but Trump supporters were attacked outside his rallies on a continual basis. Hillary supporters being attacked at her rallies was virtually unheard of.
There’s no reason to make such assumptions. Even if we only take examples where the attacker explicitly shrieks that they are doing what they are doing because of how much they hate Donald Trump, that is sufficient.